Whether you love him or hate him, you have to admire how U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss threw the state’s political community into an uproar with last week’s announcement that he won’t run again in 2014.

Chambliss made all the necessary remarks about how “frustration” with the dysfunctional Senate caused him to step down after 20 years in Congress. In the end, it comes down to this: he did not want his political career to finish with a defeat in a GOP primary.

You could safely say that the past two years were probably not the best years of Casey Cagle’s life.

The lieutenant governor spent most of the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions in a state of limbo after a rebellious faction of Republican senators passed new rules that stripped Cagle of his powers to appoint committees and run the administrative affairs of the state Senate.

We’re still trying to crawl out from under an economic slowdown that has lasted for more than four years. Unemployment continues to be too high and too many people who run businesses are struggling to get by.

As we get closer to the end of the year, however, there are signs of encouragement and reasons to believe that an upturn may finally be underway.

At some point during the next year, Gov. Nathan Deal might have to come up with the correct answer to a most difficult question: Is spending tax money on a new stadium for Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank so important that it justifies throwing away the job of governor?

Blank thinks it would be a great idea for the state to spend $300 million from a hotel-motel tax to help pay for a billion-dollar stadium that would replace the Georgia Dome.

The folks at the Georgia World Congress Center Authority (WCCA) are willing to go along with this proposal.

United States Sen. Saxby Chambliss is hearing thunder from the right – and plenty of it – as he prepares for a possible run for reelection in 2014.

It’s been widely rumored that Rep. Tom Price, a Roswell Republican, has been considering a challenge to Chambliss in the GOP primary. That rumor picked up more strength when Price recently tried – and failed – to win a leadership position in the U.S. House’s Republican caucus.

There is something about U. S. Rep. John Barrow that drives normally even-tempered politicians into a frenzy.

Ever since he upset Republican incumbent Max Burns in 2004 for the 12th District seat, the state’s GOP establishment has made it a priority to drive Barrow out of Congress.

They are still trying.

In 2005, after taking control of the General Assembly, Republicans redrew the 12th District boundary lines to remove Clarke County, where Barrow was raised and served for 14 years on the county commission.

The election is over and we know who our president and members of Congress are going to be. Let’s take a few minutes and look at some of the other winners and losers in Georgia politics.

Winner: Gov. Nathan Deal.

After he took a beating on the T-SPLOST transportation tax, the governor recovered to lead the charge on the charter school constitutional amendment, approved by more than 58 percent of the state’s voters.

Regardless of how the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney plays out, Georgia Republicans should have something significant to celebrate the day after the election.

Just eight years after the GOP took control of the General Assembly in the 2004 elections, they are poised to win more than two-thirds control of both legislative chambers (that’s 120 seats in the House of Representatives and 38 in the Senate).